Global Digital Humanities Symposium at Michigan State University

Digital Humanities at Michigan State University is proud to extend its symposium series on Global DH into its third year. Digital humanities scholarship continues to be driven by work at the intersections of a range of distinct disciplines and an ethical commitment to preserve and broaden access to cultural materials. The most engaged global DH scholarship, that which MSU champions, values digital tools that enhance the capacity of scholarly critique to reflect a broad range of literary, historical, new media, and cultural positions, and diverse ways of valuing cultural production and knowledge work. Particularly valuable are strategies in which the digital form manifests a critical perspective on the digital content and the position of the researcher to their material.

With the growth of the digital humanities, particularly in under-resourced and underrepresented areas, a number of complex issues surface, including, among others, questions of ownership, cultural theft, virtual exploitation, digital rights, endangered data, and the digital divide. We view the 2018 symposium as an opportunity to broaden the conversation about these issues. Scholarship that works across borders with foci on transnational partnerships and globally accessible data is especially welcome.

Michigan State University has been intentionally global for more than 60 years, with over 1,400 faculty involved in international research, teaching, and service. For the past 20 years, MSU has developed a strong research area in culturally engaged, global digital humanities. Matrix, a digital humanities and social science center at MSU, has done dozens of digital projects in West and Southern Africa that have focused on ethical and reciprocal relationships and capacity building. WIDE has set best practices for doing community engaged, international, archival work with the Samaritan Collections, Archive 2.0. Today many scholars in the humanities at MSU are engaged in digital projects relating to global, indigenous, and/or underrepresented groups and topics.

This symposium, which will include a mixture of presentation types, welcomes 300-word proposals related to any of these issues, and particularly on the following themes and topics by Friday, December 15, 11:59pm EST:

Critical cultural studies and analytics

Cultural heritage in a range of contexts

DH as socially engaged humanities and/or as a social movement

Open data, open access, and data preservation as resistance, especially in a postcolonial context

DH responses to crisis

How identity categories, and their intersections, shape digital humanities work

Global research dialogues and collaborations

Indigeneity – anywhere in the world – and the digital

Digital humanities, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism

Global digital pedagogies

Borders, migration, and/or diaspora and their connection to the digital

Digital and global languages and literatures

The state of global digital humanities community

Digital humanities, the environment, and climate change

Innovative and emergent technologies across institutions, languages, and economies